SICStus MT - A Multithreaded Execution Environment for SICStus Prolog

The development of intelligent software agents and other complex applications which continuously interact with their environments has been one of the reasons why explicit concurrency has become a necessity in a modern Prolog system today. Such applications need to perform several tasks which may be very different with respect to how they are implemented in Prolog. Performing these tasks simultaneously is very tedious without language support. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a prototype multithreaded execution environment for SICStus Prolog. The threads are dynamically managed using a small and compact set of Prolog primitives implemented in a portable way, requiring almost no support from the underlying operating system

ACE: And/or-parallel copying-based execution of logic programs

In this paper we present a novel execution model for parallel implementation of logic programs which is capable of exploiting both independent and-parallelism and or-parallelism in an efficient way. This model extends the stack copying approach, which has been successfully applied in the Muse system to implement or-parallelism, by integrating it with proven techniques used to support independent and-parallelism. We show how all solutions to non-deterministic andparallel goals are found without repetitions. This is done through recomputation as in Prolog (and in various and-parallel systems, like &-Prolog and DDAS), i.e., solutions of and-parallel goals are not shared. We propose a scheme for the efficient management of the address space in a way that is compatible with the apparently incompatible requirements of both and- and or-parallelism. We also show how the full Prolog language, with all its extra-logical features, can be supported in our and-or parallel system so that its sequential semantics is preserved. The resulting system retains the advantages of both purely or-parallel systems as well as purely and-parallel systems. The stack copying scheme together with our proposed memory management scheme can also be used to implement models that combine dependent and-parallelism and or-parallelism, such as Andorra and Prometheus

Abstract State Machines 1988-1998: Commented ASM Bibliography

An annotated bibliography of papers which deal with or use Abstract State Machines (ASMs), as of January 1998.Comment: Also maintained as a BibTeX file at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm

The &-prolog system: Exploiting independent and-parallelism

The &-Prolog system, a practical implementation of a parallel execution niodel for Prolog exploiting strict and non-strict independent and-parallelism, is described. Both automatic and manual parallelization of programs is supported. This description includes a summary of the system's language and architecture, some details of its execution model (based on the RAP-WAM model), and data on its performance on sequential workstations and shared memory multiprocessors, which is compared to that of current Prolog systems. The results to date show significant speed advantages over state-of-the-art sequential systems